I think the best part of Murderbot is its staunch belief that it’s average at its job, and it only does better because it doesn’t have a working governor module
It’s always like, I’m just a SecUnit, the only reason I’m better is because humans somehow have worse judgement than me in my very narrow field of expertise, and I have the ability to process multiple things at once, and I don’t die when I get my shit wrecked. None of these are advantages over other bots, so I’m actually just average as far as skills go.
Meanwhile, Murderbot’s track record is something like ‘regularly takes out other SecUnits, regularly hacks fairly complicated systems, takes out multiple hostiles while saving and protecting clients/hostages, beat two Combat Bots in succession, and went toe to toe with a Combat SecBot while taking out two other SecUnits, rounding it off with inhabiting spaceships and crushing the incredibly difficult and malicious killware infecting them.’
That’s not even counting the guts, skill, and determination it takes to hack your own hardware/code which is fully capable of frying your brain in the first place
Something I love is that a large chunk of Murderbot’s success is just - it literally asks for help?
There’s a line in Exit Strategy, “Bots are instructed to report and repel theft attempts, but no one ever tells them not to answer polite requests from other bots.”
Murderbot makes use of this a lot. It talks to other bots, like ART and Miki. It offers equal trades of assistance, like with the Combat SecUnit in Exit Strategy, SecUnit 3 in Network Effect, and the ComfortUnit in Rogue Protocol.
In Exit Strategy, it reached out to the human supervisors to get Dr. Mensah an opening to get onto the shuttle. Even at the very beginning, in All Systems Red, it warns the team about the external combat over-ride.
Murderbot makes itself out to be a natural loner, but ‘ask for help’ has literally been one of it’s go-to strategies since book 1. And I think that’s beautiful.
#murderbot would be very upset to know that its superpower is friendship (tags via hoarder-of-stories-27)
so true
